* Posts by The Indomitable Gall

1657 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

Microsoft forbids class actions in new Windows licence

The Indomitable Gall

@Graham Wilson

Actually, the reason the state of grammar teaching is so woefully inadequate in the UK is that hardliners like yourself give a very bad impression of what good grammar really is.

Contractions are sloppiness -- they're part of the language and have always been. They are entirely necessary and inevitable in a stress-timed language, and English is a stress-timed language. A sentence such as "I wouldn't've been in the house" gets two natural stresses, and if you try to enunciate every word fully as "I would not have been in the house", you just won't be able to fit it to the natural rhythm and you will end up stressing something that you didn't intend to.

I never hear your sort complaining about French, which has codified the contracted forms as the one and only correct form -- "J'ai" but never "Je ai"; "je n'en ai (pas)" and never "je ne en ai pas" etc. In fact, this may be one of the contributing factors to the failure of English grammar teaching -- the "contracted form" is in reality the base form, and the so-called "full form" is really the *emphatic* form. By trying to claim that the emphatic form is the unmarked form, you fail to connect with the student's internal model, and cause them to reject everything that you're trying to teach them.

With regards to "tsunami", there's several things I could say. The consonant cluster /ts/ only occurs in syllable codas in English -- it is not available in syllable onsets. Consider the word "garage", which is also a borrowing. Do you say "GARage" or "garAGE"? If you compare the two, the -GE ending sounds different in them. How so? Because the the French-like GE of garAGE is only possible in the coda of stressed syllables in English. When the stress shifted to the first syllable (to better match the underlying patterns of English) it naturally resulted in a change of consonant quality. Either way, I bet you don't pronounce it with a French R. Similar, I bet you don't enunciate the first O in the borrowings "potato" and "tomato". And finally, can you tell me the stressed mora in the Japanese word "tsunami" (or even if it has one at all) and do you pronounce it with the correct pitch accent when you say it? I doubt it.

The whole 's/s' thing is another pointless mess, arising from a failure to look at the nature of the genitive in modern English. The "plural possessive" doesn't actually match the internal model of the native speaker, where the possessive suffix/clitic 's is appended to a genitive, and as we all know (or would if we studied grammar properly), the English genitive (aka the "classifier noun") is always singular. For example "bread knife" and "toothbrush". Your "greenhouse" is full of greenS, plural. This is the reason that we only pronounce one S in plural possessive -- because there is only one S: the possessive S, not the plural. The orthographic distinction between s' and 's has no analogue in the native grammar.

It's you sort that convinces people that grammar is valueless, so why not leave the matter to people who actually understand the matter?

(And for the record, I'm a native speaker and I got first class honours in English Language at uni.)

BBC uses lifted Iraq war photo to depict Syrian slaughter

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Cock-up indeed, even with disclaimer, but don't blame the teacher

As a (senior) lecturer, you probably have no concept of how unabidably crap the average corporate trainer is. It's a certificate culture out there, and the delegates (I won't demean the term "student" by using it here) are expected to sit, listen, maybe "brainstorm" a bit, then walk away with a piece of paper.

It's really rather disheartening.

The Indomitable Gall

Why, oh why...

Why are all of Nick Robinson's articles for the BBC on politics?

Why are all of Murray Walker's TV reports on Formula 1?

Why does Bill Bailey only perform comic music?

It's his job, muppet.

Microsoft will fiddle with prices as euro burns, UK biz fears

The Indomitable Gall

Re: People will just import cheaper versions...or even worse.

"The UK wil find ways to get software from the continent... "

"doesn't EU law mean that a person in the UK can purchase from any other EU state anyway?"

Erm... isn't that exactly the point? Microsoft are creating a single price for the single market, hence the Euro pricing....

Self-driving Volvos cover 200km of busy Spanish motorway

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Misnomer

Your onboard computer and their onboard computer talk, and they know when the routes are diverging.

The Indomitable Gall

Re: But does it fail safe?

"If this "platoon" is dependent on the lead lorry to provide guidance, what happens when LL fails, breaks, or loses its wifi?"

I don't think it's dependent on any particular vehicle -- I believe the point of such technology is that any vehicle can be the lead, allowing ad hoc roadtrains to be formed with no prior planning.

The reason for a lorry taking point here may be the increased draft/slipstream/windshadow of the larger vehicle, or it maybe that they wanted to use a more powerful (and therefore more reliable) wifi transmitter in the test, just to be safe.

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Slight problem

"Who the hell wants to follow a lorry in their car on a motorway??"

It's called slipstreaming/drafting and it means greater fuel economy. If you're worried about the cost of petrol, it's a good thing. If you just want to get there quickly, you wouldn't be joining a road-train.

And the worst film NEVER made is...

The Indomitable Gall

Human Centipede: the musical

Lead character: the entire cast of hit stage show "Stomp!"

WTF is... Li-Fi?

The Indomitable Gall
Boffin

Let's speak geek.

"And light isn't affected by the spectrum regulations that govern how radio frequencies can be used."

I think what you mean is that light is in an unregulated frequency band.

Science!

The Indomitable Gall

Re: People have been trying this for years. LED's not needed.

"This sound like a gimmick to sell more LED's but I think non domestic lighting has a) a *huge* installed base and b) is fairly efficient. That makes a *lot* of market inertia."

Two possibilities:

1: "Riding the wave". The guys behind this are running on the assumption that once LED pricing hits a certain sweet-spot, there will be a massive changeover, possibly pushed by new legislation on energy efficiency and/or mercury in manufacture and/or the workplace. If they have a mature(ish) technology before that happens, then they have an "in" to the market. They need to have their technology available for when everyone rewires, cos they're not going to rewire twice.

2: "Making the wave". They may feel that the increased efficiency of LEDs isn't going to be enough to convince people to swallow the cost of switching, but that this technology can help push the uptake of LEDs. "Double your office wireless capacity while halving your electricity bill." That's a lot easier to sell....

Greedy LOHAN draining away mankind's vital fluid ... allegedly

The Indomitable Gall

You know, when someone's satirically taking the p!ss out of the fundies, you look a bit silly when you jump in to slag him off for being one.

The Indomitable Gall

@AC re:inflammable

Well, do you object to the "in" in "inform"? Is "intubating" someone something to do with "no tubes"? And what about a sharp "in"take of breath? Is "in"vestment about not wearing underwear on the upper body? Is "in"fluence a bad thing?

I hope you find this comment "in"sightful.

Chrome spends a week at the top of the browser charts

The Indomitable Gall

Avast!

With my last Avast AV update, Chrome got installed and set as default without asking. Whenever the Avast popup gives me a link, the link opens in Chrome, even though it's not my default browser.

I suspect a lot of the recent boost in popularity of Chrome is down to this one piece of software. The fact that it's particularly popular in poorer countries where people aren't likely to allow inertia to keep them paying for a Norton or MacAfee license is quite telling....

Report: SAP exec charged with $1,000 LEGO bar-code caper

The Indomitable Gall
Pint

Re: LEGO

There seems to be something about childhood memories that makes us specifically reject linguistic variation relating to them. I hate the term "legos" because that's not what I said when I spent hours playing with Lego, and I hate the term "video games" because I grew up playing "computer games".

As for routers, a router routs, and a router routes. I wouldn't want a device that "routs" my network -- I'd prefer one that "routes" traffic any day of the week. Except possibly Friday afternoon, cos if the network falls over then, we can just go to the pub.

Audi proposes PC-packing stunt bikes

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Computerised bikes from Audi.

@Dan 10

" I may be wrong, but ISTR that it had more to do with cocky magazine journalists thinking it was so kitted out that... "

AKA "You're holding it wrong" and "Unlimited broadband"....

Resistance is futile? Memristor RAM now cheap as chips

The Indomitable Gall

Re: accidental discovery my arse

Erm... that doesn't preclude accidental discovery. Temporary adhesives existed long before the Post-It note, but the specific adhesive in Post-Its was accidentally discovered while 3M were trying to invent a rival to Loctite's SuperGlue.

The point is that the memrister existed, but was expensive to make. This is an apparently cheaper way to make one, and it was discovered by accident.

Smoke-belching flash drive self-destructs on command

The Indomitable Gall

Remote detonation.

Think about it -- anyone with high enough security requirements *will* *not* *want* a publically available protocol for remote detonation: they'll want a top secret, in-house one. They can roll their own and simply connect it to the appropriate pins on the device.

I mean, imagine if the US army invaded Iran with this stuff in their equipment and the Iranians just started saturating the airwaves with remote destruct signals.

So the manufacturer can't make the remote option as standard.

Scotland considers dishing out more iPads to schoolkids

The Indomitable Gall

ICT -> Computers

You can use Logo for geometry. You can use GNU Octave to do some pretty funky maths with automatic graphs.

iPads? A couple of drawings and early onset carpal tunnel syndrome....

US dope farmer in Walmart rattlesnake chomp shock

The Indomitable Gall

Re: News of the World 2

And "ho registros" responded to the quote by making a re-enactment of a youth tantrum with clay figurines. And pictures of robots.

'Shame on the register to post wrong informations'

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Restriction Of Ideas Is Silly

"If you can make a Ford Fiesta cheaper or better than Ford, then why can’t you? Because Ford came up with the design first?"

No, because Ford spent untold millions on making the design, including simulations, wind-tunnel tests and crash tests. Copying their design gives you immediate commercial advantage cos you haven't had to do all the R&D.

The Indomitable Gall

Selectively quoting? Well, at least he's quoting -- {{citation needed}}, Jeebus!

Ten... freeware gems for new PCs

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Avast!

Same here. It installed Chrome and made it my default browser. That's malware behaviour, that is.

Ten... crowd-funded games from veteran devs

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Multiplayer ELITE - where are you?

@CraigRoberts

"I don't want a point and click RPG. I want a real time space-flight-fight sim."

Erm... no. Space flight takes a Very Long Time Indeed, which is why Elite featured the "skip drive" -- it's just dull otherwise.

And even if the observed time is short, remember that time at such velocities is relativistic -- it may seem like seconds to you, but it's years to someone else. Also, the time in a space station is massively truncated -- real trading time would be far higher.

Real-time space flight sims are impossible until and unless you can play them in a simulator that spins at relativistic velocities and you're willing to spend a couple of days just because the fur trader on your destination space station has gone off to a family funeral.....

Head over Heels

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Anyone remember "The Pit" in Penitentiary World?

I have a feeling there were two robots in the room you're thinking of, but yes, that one is a memorably nasty bugger....

The Indomitable Gall

Resurrection fish?!?

Methinks thou meanst "reincarnation fish".

Red faces abound as boffins build gamma ray lens

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Paging David Banner

As a kid I always thought they were calling him "David Banning" and that he was operating under the crappest, most transparent pseudonym ever...

Pirate island attracts more than 100 startup tenants

The Indomitable Gall

Re: tax

What's the current situation with the liner "The World"? It seems like we've already got an example of a mobile offshore tax haven, and one that is quite open about it. Why would anyone need to be clandestine?

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Tidal waves

Tidal waves (tsunamis) aren't much bother in international waters, usually. They only gain height when they enter inshore waters and the leading edge of the surge slows, causing the rushing water to pile up.

Whether the shelf outside the SF bay is shallow enough to be a tsunami risk, I don't know. However, while much of the shelf is in international waters, it's mostly still within the US contiguous zone, so the US would have some legal grounds to challenge them if residents do anything that isn't legal in the US, or if they consider it a tax-dodge...

Pilots asking not to fly F-22 after oxygen problems

The Indomitable Gall

Re: A negative article about the F-22?!

Lewis is currently receiving oxygen from the paramedics.... ;-)

The Indomitable Gall

Re: 'The Right Stuff'

True enough.

Look at automatic belay devices for climbers. Statistically safer than a human buddy, but there's something about the randomness of failure that really makes them frightening. Yeah, my buddy's more likely to drop me, but at least there's some notion of "control" in human error.

The Indomitable Gall

Re: No one gone for the obvious Top Gun song reference?

Erm... isn't that what the subhead is all about...?

Moon at annual perigee this weekend

The Indomitable Gall

Statistics...

"the NASA video below says that tides will rise only a few centimetres and that there's no link between increases in crime and close moon approaches."

That's because NASA are ignoring the effect of tidal forces on statistics. Our base reference is pulled out of whack by the moon's gravity. If you think about it, all our mountains shrink at high tide, right? We measure our mountains by height *above sea level*, after all.

Now if tides do the same thing to our base reference of crime statistics, then a "no change" is actually an increase proportionally equal to the tidal distance, thus explaining the disparity between NASAs view and popular perception.

Biennial boner blights Beemer biker

The Indomitable Gall

German vehicles....

What does the Sociedad Española de Automóviles de Turismo have to do with German cars...?

The Indomitable Gall

Long-known

“It’s been long-known that compression of the neurovascular supply to the penis - if it’s compressed for a period of time, whether it be on a bicycle seat or some other device - it can actually cause prolonged numbness of the genitalia.”

Yup, and every lifestyle cyclist is well aware of this and will look for a saddle that has a gap designed to prevent pressure on the perineum for this very reason. Anyone who makes a saddle these days and doesn't take it into account really is pretty negligent....

Want to be a better marksman? Play shooting games

The Indomitable Gall

Re: The object to your left is your weapon in the upcoming zombie apocalypse

The object to my left is a long-distance touring road bicycle. I'm alright with that....

Intel bakes palm-sized Core i5 NUC to rival Raspberry Pi

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Shut down on fan fail.

Exactly. Ergo if the fan doesn't work, your whole system's down. Which is a nuisance when what you're looking for is a relatively low-spec item with relatively high uptime. A lower spec processor with no fan will be a better candidate for interactive displays, PoS systems etc.

UK Ministry of Defence eyes GPS patent payoff

The Indomitable Gall

Mistake...

"“a method for generating a subcarrier modulation signal for modulating a further signal, the method involving multiplexing or selectively combining portions for first and second subcarriers to produce the subcarrier modulation signal"

My GPS receiver doesn't generate these subcarrier modulation signals, does it? That would be the satellites' job. They maybe should have worded the patent method slightly differently....

iPhone 5 in ICE CREAM SANDWICH photo riddle

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Trademark and non-4G

Trademarks are industry specific, but in most jurisdictions you can still be done for "passing off" if you seem to be attempting to trade off the reputation of a synonymous entity. If I recall correctly, in the US, that was established by law, but in the UK I think it was established by precedent. Either way, the use of a mobile phone in the advert certainly would qualify as sufficiently confusing to be a case of passing off.

Crytek: Schemes to strike second-hand games biz 'awesome'

The Indomitable Gall

Re: I got some second hand food he can have

@AC

"OK jai, practically every other industry on the planet since time began has managed to factor in reclaiming cost of R&D into the single initial sale, so why does the software industry have to be any different?"

I assure you that the profit on a car is far more than the profit on your latest game. And yet the cost of developing a new game is increasing every year, and the cost of developing a new car is dropping every year.

The Indomitable Gall

@Mad Mike

So, run games as advertising campaigns for the next game. Each game is an advert... where's the product? I mean, your advertising has to actually *sell* something, doesn't it?

Ofcom: The Office of Screwing Over Murdoch?

The Indomitable Gall

Re: Orlowski gets it wrong

I never heard about the emails -- I only heard about the voicemails. The email claims could not possibly have caused me to be any more revulsed than I already was. I doubt many people would say any different. They couldn't have gotten any lower unless they'd started beating people up to get stories!

Compulsory coding in schools: The new Nerd Tourism

The Indomitable Gall

Andrew Orlowski needs to spend a week in an office.

In any corporate environment, you can find dozens of people "programming" at any one time. Whether it's a bodged-together spreadsheet or a VBA macro in Word, it's still programming. It's just very *bad* programming... because the people doing it aren't trained in programming.

Programming is the art of automating information manipulation. Lots of time is lost in all desk jobs to people doing manually what they could easily automate with a simple shell script.

Programming *is* a core skill for the modern world.

Of course, it is correct to say that the people in charge of primary syllabus design don't really understand what programming *is*, and would most likely fall into the old web-design trap instead of teaching structured thought, but that's a different issue.

The Indomitable Gall

@Will Godfrey

"This is where I would like to see programming fit in, not as a must-do separate entity, which will be slow enough to frustrate those with natural talent and esoteric enough to bore the rest out of their skulls."

Yesyesyesyesyes.

My first taste of programming in school was a bit of Logo. It was integrated with the "angles" part of the primary maths syllables: right-angles, squares, triangles, circles. But while a Logo-led syllabus would have required the teaching of internal angles in convex n-sided polygons, and of mathematical functions( f(n) = (n-2) /180 ), that wasn't on the primary syllabus, so we didn't have the fundamental grounding to do anything useful with the turtle graphics anyway. In the end, I never learnt about internal angles on arbitrary polygons until university.

Computer programming CANNOT be an isolated, modularised, standalone subject. It must be linked to the rest of the syllabus, thus showing that there's a reason for it and actually helping illustrate topics being taught.

Oracle v Google could clear way for copyright on languages, APIs

The Indomitable Gall

Re: "Intellectual property exists to encourage innovation"

There are people who are genuinely afraid to talk about their ideas for fear of having them nicked.

I'm currently working on some language learning software, but I can't release any early public betas because there is no copyright protection on my ideas, and if someone with more time and money than me decided to reimplement my ideas, they would end up with a killer app and a first-to-market advantage. If software was patentable here (the UK) I'd have a prototype in the patent office this summer and a public beta started. It would then be easier for me to get critical mass to push to v1.0 and start earning the cash to support full-time development (and the hiring of a GUI designer -- not my strong point).

That said, I'm against software patents on an ideological level, but to argue flat that IP protection does not encourage innovation is incorrect. It encourages ground-up innovation (such as it would in the case of my software) but in some ways it does discourage *incremental* innovation (eg if someone wanted to add an improved learning task to my software, they wouldn't be allowed to in a patented world).

There's a balance to be struck. Neither "free-for-all" or "screwed down tight" offers the required protection or flexibility.

Instagram

The Indomitable Gall

Talking of pixlr-o-matic...

I installed pixlr-o-matic on my new cheapo Android handset. My biggest beef with it was that the added defects (sparkles, lines, fuzz etc) were all fixed overlays rather than procedurally-generated interference patterns -- or in plain speak, they're the same every time, limiting their usefulness if you take a lot of snaps. What I'm looking for is a simple program that doesn't give me the same result picture after picture. What is available out there?

Ten... Bedroom Gadget Treats

The Indomitable Gall

Re: I'm dubious

"what use is an alarm clock that wakes you up 20 minutes before or after the time you set it for?"

Incomplete sleep cycles make you no less tired than no sleep at all in the long-term, and in the short term it makes for a very nasty start to the day.

By waking you up only when you're ready, you get a much calmer rousing, and you're much better off for it.

Death Star dinosaur aliens could rule galaxy

The Indomitable Gall

Re: homochirality

As they're also likely to be creationists, their response might be particularly interesting, when it come to dinosaur extinction....

The Indomitable Gall

Re: And then...

"After 65 million years even the slow tectonic plates are going to have moved a couple of thousand kilometres, and the quick ones double that. That means most of the evidence of an industrial civilisation is going to have been subducted back under the crust."

Aha, the same process by which all evidence of the existence of dinosaurs was destroyed, meaning that we now have no physical evidence they ever existed. No fossilised bones, no fossilised footprints, no tar-pit or amber specimens. In fact, with so little evidence, we never even postulated their existence or invented the word dinosaur!

Publishing giants sue open textbook startup over layout

The Indomitable Gall

You're missing the point.

The idea is that a university lecturer will give you a bunch of section references to read and revise between classes that are specific to a textbook. By using the same references as a commercial textbook, you get the opportunity to nick their audience, and you're doing it off the back of their work.

The Indomitable Gall

Interesting UK law.

OK, so it's not directly applicable to this case (as it's not US law) but here in the UK we have a law that directly encodes a principle that deals with this sort of thing. I think it's called "Typographical arrangements".

"1. In a typical publication, copyright subsists both in the content of a work and also in the typographical arrangement and design elements of the work. Typographical arrangement covers the style, composition, layout and general appearance of a page of a published work." [Her Mayesty's Stationery Office]

This notion of "arrangement" even extends to the selection and numbering of songs or poems in a collection, and the selection of specific verses within those poems or songs. If I spend a lot of time collecting, editing and typesetting a bunch of 18th centre verses, then the law protects me from someone walking up, copying the (public domain) contents and undercutting me -- this is only right.

I'm not a fan of the exploitative nature of the textbook market, but the principles behind this suit are sound.